Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

DigitalOcean is a cutting-edge technology company focused on simplifying cloud and AI for builders. In this role, the Principal Engineer will lead the design and development of scalable database platforms, ensuring high availability and performance while driving innovation and technical excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve the architecture of large-scale distributed database systems optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency
• Architect solutions for storage engines, indexing, querying, caching, replication, and high availability, drawing from best practices in both relational and NoSQL paradigms
• Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery
• Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the database engineering teams
• Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team’s culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence
• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps
• Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to define database solutions and migration strategies aligned with organizational goals
• Lead Operations Excellence for database services, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar
• Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for database platforms
• Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations
• Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types

Requirements:

• ≥ 12–15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure
• Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud
• Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams